My Favourite Periodical:


June 7th:

"It has been known for years that HIV is hard to pass on during normal heterosexual intercourse. Only one copulation in 500-1,000 with an infected individual will do so. The risk comes with certain behaviour (anal intercourse, which risks tearing the lining of the gut; and injecting drugs using dirty needles), certain professions (prostitutes of both sexes) and certain ways of life (multiple, simultaneous lovers, rather than serial polygamy). Aiming propaganda at heterosexual teenagers is (outside the special case of Africa) a waste of money...

Africans do not have more lovers than other people in the course of their lives, but they do tend to have more at the same time. That creates networks, rather than chains, of transmission, making it easier for HIV to spread. A politically correct refusal to offend by stating that this makes a difference meant, once again, that efforts elsewhere were aimed at preventing a heterosexual epidemic that was never going to happen."


June 14th:

"SIR –“Text-messaging corrupts all languages,” you say in your article on text-messaging in France (“Parlez-vous SMS?”, May 24th). I can imagine the French believing this, but the studies on SMS that have been done over the past five years show quite the opposite. I recently researched the field and the results are clear.

Text messages do not use as many abbreviations as people think: typically less than 10% of the words in a text will be abbreviated. These abbreviations are not new, but have been around in some cases for hundreds of years. Rebuses such as C for “see” and U for “you” were common in Victorian times. Furthermore, huge numbers of texts these days are sent by adults (the oldest person I know who texts is an 86-year-old grandmother), and by institutions ranging from the BBC to the stockmarket. In institutional texts, standard English is the norm, and abbreviations are often disallowed.

Text-messaging gives children a motivating opportunity to practise reading and writing, to improve their skills in economy of expression, and to play with the sounds and spellings of the language in imaginative ways. Not surprising, then, that studies are beginning to show that the more you text, the better your literacy scores will be. Even the French will discover this, in due course.

David Crystal
Holyhead, Anglesey"

[On a sociological biography of Rorty] "Those who agree with Rorty's critique of philosophy will be tempted to conclude from this volume that sociology is even worse."

"Italy, Greece, Egypt and China, for instance, declare that they have a right to ancient objects created on their land. It is their cultural patrimony, they say. Is it?... Mr Appiah lays bare the illogicality of many cultural patrimony claims. Take, for example, Nigeria’s assertion that it has a right to possess Nok sculpture, made on its terrain 2,000 years ago. Mr Appiah points out that nothing is known about the people who made this sculpture, its purpose or its owners. About the only thing that can be said with certainty is that Nok sculpture was not made for Nigeria, a country that has yet to celebrate its centenary."


June 28th:

"In November 2007 Tunisia blocked access to the popular video-sharing sites YouTube and DailyMotion, which both carried material about Tunisian political prisoners. It was not for the first time, and many other countries have blocked access to such sites, either to protect public morals, or to spare politicians’ blushes. What was unusual this time was the response. Tunisian activists and their allies organised a “digital sit-in”, linking dozens of videos about civil liberties to the image of the presidential palace in Google Earth. That turned a low-key human-rights story into a fashionable global campaign. "
Repetition of the lie makes it credible

"He admits that some hip-hop lyrics display an ungentlemanly attitude towards women, but he doubts that listening to violent lyrics causes people to behave more violently. If it did, there would be more opera fans stabbing their ex-lovers outside bullfights... Hip-hop’s revolutionary potential is best expressed by “conscious” rappers who focus on important issues rather than babes, bling and booze. The Roots, a group from Philadelphia, are often cited as an example. Their message? “If I can’t work to make it, I’ll rob and take it. Either that or me and my children are starving and naked.”"


July 5th:

"The tradition of circumcision is a difficult topic existing at the nexus of religion and penises, two subjects about which humanity is prone to be particularly irrational."

"Post-modernism, writes Mr Chaudhuri, is “polyphony; the conflation and confusion of fantasy with history”, a “rhetoric of excess, plenty and a relentless engulfing inclusiveness”, which has been the context for Indian writers since the 1981 publication of Salman Rushdie’s babbling narrative, “Midnight’s Children”."

"It is tempting to think that he is joking, and that his theoretical elaborations about the true significance of communist-era jokes are a subtle parody of the way that modern literary critics so often miss the point of the texts they write about. It is almost comical to read his po-faced but pointless consideration of whether jokes about Stalin predated Stalin’s own jokes—almost comical, but not quite."


July 12th:

[On Dalits and night soil collection] "“The toilet is a tool of social change,” declares Bindeshwar Pathak, a (high-caste) brahmin who started the charity in 1970 and has developed a passion for lavatorial technology"

"Like many things that go wrong in America, the drift away from nature is commonly blamed on television, video games and the internet. This is implausible. The number of park visitors rose steeply between the 1950s and the mid-1980s, even as the first two electronic lures spread. Rather more credible is the explanation that Americans are more fearful for their children and have become unwilling to leave them in the company of strange men, green-hatted or otherwise. But the biggest reason of all is competition."

"Paine proponents quote John Adams: “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” Paine did not argue merely for the ending of slavery and monarchy but for public education, animal rights, women’s rights, a guaranteed minimum income and a pension for the elderly."
More grumbling by ungrateful peasants.

"BAD schools, the left insists, are bad because they do not have enough money. The nation’s capital somewhat undermines this theory. Spending per pupil in Washington, DC, is a whopping 50% higher than the national average, yet the city’s public schools are atrocious. If it were a state, its pupils’ test scores would rank dead last."

"Conservatives and liberals have discovered one thing they can agree on: that Barack Obama is a cynical opportunist, a flip-flopper and a shape-changer, a man who brushes aside his principles with the same nonchalance that lesser mortals reserve for their dandruff."


July 19th:

"Your article on the regulation of pesticides should have pointed out that slightly exceeding the “maximum residue levels” in some food, as occasionally happens, is a risk perhaps equivalent to the likelihood of being hit on the head by a meteorite (“A balance of risk”, July 5th). Of greater risk to humans is the exposure to thousands of pesticides made naturally by plants (to kill herbivorous insects) and found in all fruits and vegetables. The average daily diet contains a quarter teaspoon of natural nerve toxins, endocrine disrupters, carcinogens and chemicals that damage chromosomes, skin, blood and the thyroid.

Humans are not adapted to these natural chemicals, in which the margin of safety is about tenfold compared with traces in synthetic pesticides (some 10,000-fold higher). Yet unqualified environmental groups and European bureaucrats are obsessed with agricultural pesticide safety, basing their assumptions on unjustified fear and anxiety. Neither makes for good policy.

Anthony Trewavas
Professor of plant biochemistry
Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences
Edinburgh"

"A HEREDITARY Hindu priest, Veer Bhadra Mishra [consumes] a morning cup of Ganges water—a cloudy brown soup of excrement and industrial effluent... Mr Mishra has contracted typhoid, polio, jaundice and other water-borne ailments... By official standards, water containing more than 500 faecal coliform bacteria per 100 millilitres is considered unsafe for bathing. As it passes Mr Mishra’s temple, at the upstream end of Varanasi’s 6.5km (4 mile) stretch of terraced riverbank, or ghats, the Ganges contains 60,000 bacteria per 100ml."

[On the BJ Olympics] "An environmental official was quoted in the Hong Kong press, claiming air pollution had been exaggerated: “We don’t need any independent party to help us monitor our air quality during the event.”"

"Dave Bromberg, a grocer in Albuquerque... [thinks] Mr Obama would have trouble standing up to a free-spending Democratic Congress. “Democrats feel sorry for everybody,” he says."

"Dr He and his colleagues looked at the genes of airmen who classified themselves as black and found that the ones infected with HIV were more likely to lack red cells bearing the Duffy receptor than chance would suggest. Moreover, and more unexpectedly, such people took two years longer to progress from the point where they were infected with the virus to the one where they began to show the first symptoms of AIDS."
Since race doesn't exist, this must be due to RACISM!


July 26th:

"Awkwardly, the main traditions of scholarship and jurisprudence in Islam—both the Shia school and the four main Sunni ones—draw on Hadiths (words and deeds ascribed with varying credibility to Muhammad) to argue in support of death for apostates. And in recent years sentiment in the Muslim world has been hardening. In every big “apostasy” case, the authorities have faced pressure from sections of public opinion, and from Islamist factions, to take the toughest possible stance."

"Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born journalist who is now a columnist in Italy, was publicly baptised as a Catholic by Pope Benedict; the convert hailed his “liberation” from Islam, and has used his column to celebrate other cases of Muslims becoming Christian. To the delight of some Catholics and the dismay of others, he has defended the right of Christians to proselytise among Muslims, and denounced liberal churchmen who are “soft” on Islam. Muslims in Italy and elsewhere have called Mr Allam a provocateur and chided Pope Benedict for abetting him. But given that many of Italy’s Muslims are converts (and beneficiaries of Europe’s tolerance), Mr Allam says his critics are hypocrites, denying him a liberty which they themselves have enjoyed."

"They suffer, and pray for petrol prices to fall. Sometimes literally: Rocky Twyman, a community organiser from Maryland, leads group prayers at petrol stations to beg for divine intervention."

"The rise in the top marginal income tax rate that Mr Obama is proposing is smaller than that signed by Bill Clinton in 1993 (which took the top rate of tax from 31% to 39.6%). And analyses of that hike seem to suggest that while it had a big short-term effect on revenues, there is little evidence of large, permanent damage to incentives."